In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

13 1 the origins of Brainwashing on Friday, April 10, 1953, two months after being appointed director of the CiA, Allen dulles stood before a gathering of the Alumni Conference for Princeton university in hot springs, virginia. in less than two weeks the first exchange of prisoners of war (Pows) between the united states and north Korea, popularly known as operation little switch, would take place.1 the exchange would mark the beginning of the end of the Korean war, but as that war reached its final resolution in the fall of 1953 the Cold war continued unabated. As dulles addressed the crowd it was clear that the future of the Cold war and the ever-escalating advances in weapons technology that helped fuel it weighed heavily on his mind. in a speech that touched on the country’s fragile national security, the psychological aspects of modern warfare, and the ideological battle between the united states and the soviet union, dulles began to articulate his concerns over sophisticated new Communist psychological weaponry that had the potential to alter the Cold war struggle forever. looking out over the audience, dulles said, “in the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds—the war of ideologies—and indeed our Government has been driven by the international tension we call the ‘cold war’ to take positive steps to recognize psychological warfare and to play an active role in it. i wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in soviet hands. we might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’”2 Fleshing out the contours of “brain warfare,” dulles claimed that the Communist enemy had invented new “brain perversion techniques” that had proven the human mind was “a malleable tool.”3 the result of the Communists’ new technique was a “brain . . . [that] becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it had no H H 14 “There Is No ‘Behind the Lines’ Any Longer” control.”4 dulles concluded his speech with a dire prediction, speculating that “considerable numbers of our own boys there [in the Korean prison camps] might be so indoctrinated as to be induced, temporarily at least, to renounce country and family.”5 in the span of a few sentences dulles had transformed the figurative concept of a “battle for men’s minds” into a much more literal and horrifying conceit. the impetus for his worries was widespread rumors and classified military speculation that the Communists had successfully brainwashed a large number of American soldiers while they had been held captive in north Korea. A little over five months later, in the midst of operation Big switch, the behavior of twenty-three American soldiers appeared to confirm dulles’s predictions.6 on september 24, 1953, twenty-three American Pows arrived at the neutral nations repatriation Commission in Panmunjom, Korea, in the back of russian trucks. the men were dressed in smart blue Chinese uniforms, their jackets adorned with a small pin featuring Pablo Picasso’s iconic white dove peace symbol. As they descended from the trucks and made their way into the complex, they loudly sang the Communist internationale: “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye starvelings of want.” in a statement released to the press the soldiers said that “they love their country and some day will return—when the American people have achieved ‘freedom.’”7 As the American officers on the scene left the neutral nations repatriation compound, a deep southern accent pierced the silence, directing its ire at a press correspondent: “Go home, you imperialist yankee!”8 A wave of American Pows then rushed the barbed-wire fence “and shook their fists” at the American officers.9 For all intents and purposes, the publicity surrounding the twenty-three American soldiers in Panmunjom signaled the arrival of brainwashing as a cultural phenomenon. As news of the soldiers who refused to come home made its way to the front pages of American newspapers, they became media sensations. testifying to the importance of the soldiers’ decision to remain with their Communist captors, John Chapple, the editor of the Wisconsin Daily Press, said, “the very history of civilization rests on the outcome of this case, for if we do not act courageously to rescue these boys we are admitting that the propaganda power of Communism is more effective...

Share